BlackWaltzTheThird wrote:On the topic of who wrote what, did you have some preconcieved ideas of what you wanted to write about, and apply it to your particular character? Or were all the overarching plot themes/elements created after you knew who you were writing for?
I went into Lilly path without any real idea of what I wanted to do with it other than make a VN. Ah, youth. I had a very rigid idea of her personality (the prim and proper motherly type), which developed over time into something more detailed. Plot is something that went through heavy amounts of change during writing before ending up as it is now.
And after saying that, I'm going to say it's also somewhat, sort of, untrue. I used to think 'death of the author' was a very sensible and almost ufailing standard by which to look at fiction. That is, that a creator's circumstances, beliefs, and opinions are of dubious value in any literary examination given the distance between they and the creation process (man that was a bad summary, ask me again when I'm not exhausted in a hotel after a con). After looking back at Lilly path, and contrasting that with my own circumstances, it's just a little bit difficult to o back to that way of thinking. That's not to say I wrote my life story into her path, but simply that I can see exactly where and how my own life experiences and other such things coloured various themes, plot points, scenes, dialogue, etc. I might not have intended it, but it ended up there.
After writing Lilly and some of Hanako path, I've come to largely rethink my approach to fictional analysis, largely due to how their paths turned out in retrospect. When writing a story, the author's situation very often plays a role in its creation, whether intentional or not.
BlackWaltzTheThird wrote:Oh and bonus question; if you guys had been assigned to or otherwise ended up at the reigns of a different route, how do you think you would gone about writing it? Did you have any such ideas that maybe you didn't get to use that you could share? I guess your perceptions of a character might have differed to how whoever else wrote them to be, a phenomenon reflected in the case of the fans in relation to fanfiction interpretations, so...
I was oddly definite when I jumped onto the project that I wanted to write Lilly. Even back on the original forums, I only ever posted in the section devoted to Lilly's character. To this day, I'm not entirely sure why I was quite so stuck onto that single little character' sketch in a doujin omake page, nor why I so quickly and ardently attached such a personality to that image.
Given that, it's really hard to imagine myself at the helm of a different route (aside from hanako second half, obviously). I did have ideas of branching off a prospective Miki path off Emi path, but aside from that, I've never really thought too much about it. All the writers exchanged lots of ideas about each other's routes, so I'd say some of what people thought about paths other than theirs is actually implemented, at least in part.